Tag: podpress

I decided that I hadn’t given PodPress a fair shake, because I realized to my chagrin that I was still on WordPress 1.5.X here. So, I upgraded wordpress and reactivated. I posted a show last night, and although I do get the neat little flash player, trying to get it to do the torrents in my RSS have been between challenging and impossible. I had to go in and rewrite some of the code to even make torrents show up, and now the blog is behaving in really weird ways such as showing my different XML in Firefox versus downloaded by my management scripts. Even though it worked better this go around when I was on a proper version of WordPress, it still seems insufficient for someone who wants to use torrents primarily.

Update: I disabled the plugin, and then my RSS was correct again. This says to me that if I like the little flash player, I should just use one and leave PodPress out of it.

So Podpress sounded great on paper, and as far as I could tell didn’t do one damn thing it was supposed to. I moved the torrentcast.php file up to the main blog directory, turned off the cache, I did my post and attached media to it (the most recent show.) I included the MP3 and the torrent URL, and published. The flash player never showed up, the torrent URL never showed up in the RSS feed, no iTunes tags ever showed up. It did write the enclosure metadata, but to the MP3 rather than the torrent I wanted it to use. I farted with it for a little bit and found it highly frustrating. I tried to re-edit the post to make it take my torrent information and it just refused. I’d try to delete the meta tag altogether and podPress kept helpfully adding it back automatically while I was trying to delete it, forcing me to go into mysql and do it manually. I looked through the sparse documentation to see if one had to do something more than just turn options on in the config to make all this stuff active, but I didn’t see it.

My first impressions from using this is that it’s a great idea but the execution isn’t nearly baked. I found that the experience of trying to make it work just sucked, was confusing, didn’t work but provided no indications of why not. I would at this point not recommend using podPress. If people find that it has improved later on, let me know and I’ll give it another chance. For now, I don’t plan on wasting any more of my precious time on this flakey thing.

I’m experimenting with the Podpress plugin. I’ve got a new show ready to post (yes, kids, two shows in two days!) and I am going to see what happens if I use PodPress. It might not play well with my existing setup or it might be awesome. Either way, if something goes awry I’ll back it out and go back to my standard method. Wish me luck.